X-Message-Number: 1763 Date: Wed, 17 Feb 93 15:35:38 CST From: (Micheal B. O'Neal) Subject: CRYONICS -- CSC opening session I returned late last night from CSC -- the Computer Science Conference. This conference is the primary gathering held each year by the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery). As many of you are probably aware, the ACM is the major professional organization for computer science researchers and educators. This year the theme of the conference was "IF" and the featured speaker at the opening session was Raymond Kurzweil. Dr. Kurzweil is most famous for the "Kurzweil reader", machines that can read books to the blind. His talk concerned the consequences of Moore's Law over the next half century. Moore's Law states that computing speeds and memory densities double approximately every two years. Kurzweil pointed out that this "law" has held since the first electromechanical computers of the early 1940's (actually, he claimed it goes back further to the Hollerith tabulating machines used early in this century). He also mentioned that a similar law appears to hold for the resolution of biological scanning technologies such as MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging). What does Kurzweil see as the results of this exponential curve? Within 10 years computers will be able to handle speech and vision. Natural language translation will become a reality. Books will begin to pass into obsolescence (though he did point out that obsolescence is often a significant fraction of a product's life cycle, so books will still remain in wide use for some time.) In 20 years computers will match the human brain in terms of computations per second. It will take almost 30 years to achieve the memory capacity of the human brain. But, how will these things be programmed? That is where the talk got interesting from an immortalist point of view. The approach he offered was to scan the human brain and create the same connections within the machine. At first this would only be done with certain segments of the brain, such as the visual cortex, and in a crude manner. But as the technologies of scanning and computing improve we will be able to produce better copies of larger systems. Kurzweil predicted that around 2020 we should be able to copy the mind of a "recently dead" human to a computer. (Yes, he actually used the phrase "recently dead") He mentioned that scanning a non-living human should be easier than scanning a living human, but did not elaborate. (I assume that the primary reason is that we don't have to worry about the scanning process being damaging to the original.) He then touched on some of the ethical problems (e.g., will the copy be the "same" person). Kurzweil also mentioned other fascinating ideas like fabricating artificial bodies for these computer minds. He predicted that by 2040 common computers would be able to simulate thousands of individuals, each with thousands of times the capacity of the human mind. Heady stuff for a mainstream conference of computer scientists and educators. I found two things particularly astonishing about this presentation. First, here was a respected scientist speaking to the members of a major scientific and educational society about the possibility of uploading (although he never used that word) -- and presenting it in a positive light. The second thing that surprised me was the time line he presented. I consider myself a wide eyed optimist and agree wholeheartedly with most of what Kurzweil said. But even in my most optimistic moments, I would never have pegged uploading to occur within the next 100, not to mention, 30 years. Yet when considered in the light of Moore's Law, Kurzweil's time line seems perfectly reasonable. I was obviously not the only person caught up in his vision. His talk was the topic of conversation all day. And the immortalist message obviously got through (at least to some). For example, while waiting for an elevator later in the day, a conference attendee asked if I had attended the morning session. When I responded affirmatively, he enthusiastically commented something to the effect of "Well, if we can make it to 2020 we'll last forever." The man was not joking. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=1763